this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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Also, are we all going to pretend that Meta isn't just Facebook, the company that sold all our data to Cambridge Analytica for a quick buck, a company who then used that data to direct target right leaning moderate, pump them full of anxiety and fear, and turn them into Trump devotees? A company that then later didn't store that data properly and leaked it, allowing thousands of identities to be stolen (including mine)? Meta / Facebook / Instagram are not good actors on the internet and we should be doing more to sully their name
Not saying that Facebook/Meta aren't terrible but this is a misunderstanding of what happened with Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook didn't sell anything to Cambridge Analyitica. Their API at the time allowed CA to gather information about you and all of your friends when you took one of their free personality quizzes (during the era when 90% of Facebook was people sharing personality quizzes).
When Facebook found out what CA had done, they fixed their API to prevent it from happening again (not because they cared about user privacy but because CA got a bunch of information from them that they could use to target advertisements on their own without paying FB to run ads) and covered it up so their users wouldn't know how massively negligent they had been with their data.
So it's not that Facebook was wantonly selling you data to shady characters so much as they were carelessly leaking your data to any shady characters who happened by.
It may just be me but I feel like that is even worse. Because who knows who got a hold of it now.
Don't forget that the groups they targeted were as small as 10 people. Facebook is the reason our world is a shit as it is now. Fuck meta. Fuck Facebook. Fuck all of them. I despise them with deeper hatred than 99.99% of the things I have ever known
Don't forget that they paid teens to (unbeknownst to them) install a vpn and collect all their data, including message content
They also used a hacky mechanism bc they knew they were breaking the app store rules
Facebook / Meta / the instagram owner is evil as fuck
I would gamble all the tea in China that they sold and continue to sell data to literally anyone with a big enough sack of cash.
Well, we aren't. But if you mean "we" as in "humans". Then yes, we've already forgotten and we don't care anymore if you remind us. You're being a paranoid nerd, I don't get all this techy crap, and I'm sure Mark has learned his lesson or at the very least the government will do something.
I do mean "we" as in "humans." I think you're setting yourself up for disappointment if you think Mark Zuckerberg is going to pivot permanently away from the most profitable set of activities his company ever engaged in.
You're based on a Germany focused instance, I see. You're probably more safe from the kinds of things Facebook gets up to than we are on our side of the Atlantic. Over here, Facebook paid $100,000,000 in fines for their behavior. This was 3.3% of the original fine. No regulatory changes were made. It's unknown how much money Facebook made from data brokering with Cambridge Analytica, but they sold the data of 87 million users. Disturbingly, the number of users Facebook who directly participated in the app used to siphon this data was around 270,000. In other words, Facebook didn't even need people to interact with Facebook directly to collect information about people, since they were using network connection information to build profiles about people.
THIS is my concern about why they're so hot to get on the Fediverse right now. They don't want a huge number of users to sign up for Threads. If numerous users do, that would help them greatly with what they do want, though. They want insight into the greater distributed network of the Fediverse. They want to collect information about Mastodon, Pelorma, Friendica, Calckey, Miskey, BookWyrm, KBin, and Lemmy users who interact with users on Threads.
I'm not sure how much this will affect Meta etc., but it seems like the US gov is looking into data brokers at least: https://www.kanary.com/blog/the-cfpb-is-taking-aim-at-data-brokers-what-you-need-to-know
I wrote my senior paper at university on data collection and facebooks role in all that. You are so off base with your comment, it's sad. That "paranoid nerd" you just shit on is entirely right and you sound like a reductionist oaf
I think the comment you replied to needed a /s
Very likely! I wouldn't have thought so until you mentioned it
Really didn't think it would be necessary with "I'm sure mark learned his lesson" while he actively continues to destroy society lmao but I see the /s is necessary even on lemmy